A Past Remembered?
by silversurf4
Summary: Rachel's POV - set about halfway through S2. No particular pairings, Creese if you squint. Updated w/ new chapter around the time Charlie sends Rachel away
1. Chapter 1

**A Past Remembered?**

**Rachel's POV**

_Author's Note: I've run this past two different betas and there will invariably still be typos. I've been told it's too dark, but there were so many angles to this show and fascinating characters to explore I just couldn't help going down this rabbit hole. I don't own anything and I'm worth even less. Thanks to everyone who reads, but those who take the time to review are special folks and you keep all the budding authors out there going - so thanks._

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**RACHEL's POV - Set mid way through Season 2**_

I am sitting here at the house of this musician I met last night. I don't know his last name, but I'm sitting here eating Cheerios dressed in only his shirt, while my cell phone buzzes insistently. I know it's Charlie without looking. He thinks he can protect me, but he can't – no one can protect you

The world is a cruel place where you serve a life sentence alone. If you are lucky you don't absolutely hate your cellmate. That person chained to you through circumstance changes, but the chain's still there. I keep trying to lose it and I can't.

Part of me hates him for taking me away from the only father I knew - even if it was all a lie. Part of me is thankful because that man was not my father – he killed my whole family, and the fact I lived with him for all those years makes me ill. I miss the sureness and confidence Charlie stole from me with that revelation. I no longer trust my memory or myself and part of me resents him for rescuing me.

But little by little, snapshots from the past come back. Fragments of my life before…Jack Reese, his daughter (although she looks different now), and some small fractured things about my real family; but they are gone forever - so it seems cruel and masochistic to even try to remember what I have lost and can never have again. I lack confidence now and can't tell if what I think I recall is real or a fantasy – a dream of that happy family we all want to belong to.

What memories do flash through the dark hallways in my mind involve Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jen in our old house, but like I said I no longer trust my own memory. I recall being happy once, it was a very long time ago, and I think I remember him being a big part of that. I remember my brother wrestling with him on the living room floor. Maybe I remember it wrong; maybe I remember him wrong; maybe he's not whom I remember at all.

The Uncle Charlie I remember was a goofball who gave pony rides to my brother and me - sometimes at the same time. He could stand on his head. He had a great laugh. It was infectious – his laugh and his grin seemed to light the room up. I remember a rich sound and a true smile that inspired trust and promised safety. He smiles now but it always seems fake, forced and it's never the same one I remember. And he never laughs.

It's weird I remember more about him than my parents. The doctor says it's because he's alive and a constant reminder of my past. My parents and my brother are dead so they aren't there to reconnect the synapses in my brain that blew apart the night they died. The doctor says it's healthy to be around Uncle Charlie, but some days I think he's only a reminder of everything I lost and can never have again.

Then I look at him and think about all he's lost. His family was lost to him too. Aunt Jen isn't dead, but she's still gone and I think that might hurt more. To have some one that close and still not be able to reach them. He lost his job, his house, his position in the department and twelve years of his life. Only someone who's been through what we've endured can tell you that no amount of money can make up for it. It can't buy back anything important - time, love or family.

Some days when he's not aware I'm looking - I see past the façade he shows to everyone else. I see it for what it is because I do it too – pretend. I pretend so much I no longer recognize real emotion. I wonder if he feels that way too? He seems lost, faraway and disconnected from the world around him. I know this feeling, this separation from the world, this same melancholy.

There are days when I feel like a shadow or a ghost – almost as if I died with my family and I'm not really here at all. The world seems false to me, out of balance and mean – always mean, selfish, petty and little. I think Charlie sees it too. The only one that seems to connect to him is me – but it's a sad, tortured connection that takes us both back to haunted places and murky times. Memory mired in oppressive black mud sucking us both backward into a tortured past and away from any chance of a brighter future.

I wish sometimes that I could remember more. My impressions of my parents are faded now like fax paper left in the sun. Whole portions of my memory are just blackened, burnt away. Sometimes a smell or a sound will remind me of something. A child's toy or a snippet of a song will spark a long forgotten memory, unlocking it like a window into my past.

All that remains of what I can recall is Uncle Charlie, but I don't trust my memory of him and I don't feel like I know him anymore. I'm not sure he knows himself anymore either. Maybe the people we used to be died the night my family did and all we'll ever be are sad two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of those people.

The night Uncle Charlie shot his father, I saw the first true unfiltered emotion from him I could recall - and it was hate. He hates his father. I want to tell him how lucky he is to have his father alive, but the hate was so real, so fresh – it fascinated me.

Then Dani Reese came to the house, I knew her, but I didn't - and he was different. She was real to him; she mattered. To her, with her – he did not pretend, he did not lie, he did not evade and it made me realize there is a future – even if he doesn't believe in it. She is pulling him slowly toward it and I'm not sure either of them even see it. But I see it and it gives me hope, and hope is something we could all use a little more of.


	2. Chapter 2

It's quiet in the car as Uncle Charlie drives me to the airport. In my bag is a fistful of cash, I have no real concept of how much it is - but I know it's a lot. There's also a passport, in my real name, Rachel Seybolt, which I don't remember applying for. Ted once told me Uncle Charlie had "interesting connections" and I guess this is what he meant.

When I registered in school, Charlie insisted I use my real name. I think it was a stubborn streak in him and the only way of keeping my family (or the memory of it) alive. It made it easier for the people looking for me to find me but I think Uncle Charlie felt he could protect me. Something has happened that makes him doubt that now.

Someone has placed fear into a man who doesn't know fear.

The quiet gives me time to study him and I can tell he's very worried. It's more than what he says. There is "tenseness" in every line in his body, his jaw set in fierce determination and blue eyes steely; it's that tension more than anything is what convinced me not to argue about his demand that I leave. I don't know enough to be scared, but the fact that he is - scares me.

He couldn't make Aunt Jen and her family leave, but he did his best to sever that bond. It created enough distance (he hoped) to keep them safe. I'm headed somewhere I don't know, but then that's not really new for me. Most of my life has been played out absent my input and the only portion I've controlled is my reaction. I learned that intuitively, but it wasn't until I lived with Charlie that I realized its what we all do.

People think they control their lives; they don't. Life happens to us.

Charlie knows this more acutely than anyone and somehow he's at peace with it instead of annoyed by it like his partner. She seems intent on bending the world to her way, but Dani Reese is about the only person Charlie trusts enough to let stay. I know now that she's Jack Reese's daughter. _Hey, I can do research as well as the next kid_.

Information from the wonders of the Internet and one of the benefits of living in a free society, right? She graduated from the LAPD Academy at 23 and then did a stint in vice, followed by a disastrous rotation in narcotics. That part I learned from connected friends in the business. In the drug world, news travels fast. She must have been good; because no one had a clue she was a cop. She was so far gone, they had to take her out and put her straight into rehab. Maybe that's why she's got a huge chip on her shoulder. I know that kind of resentment, I feel it too.

You can find out a lot about a person on the Internet, but none of the important stuff.

Her hopes, her dreams? Those I can't know and to tell the truth I think she's lost touch with them – because she seems kinda sad and broken – in some ways a lot like Uncle Charlie. It's only when they are together that either of them seem whole – as weird as that sounds.

Charlie thinks he's keeping his private vendetta or "investigation" as he likes to call it - from me, but he's not. I know that Jack Reese protected me when I was younger, but it wasn't because he cared me about me like I thought. I was naïve enough to believe that before, but my naïveté is burning off fast these days. Jack Reese was one of the bad guys, connected to the people who killed my family, maybe even controlling them, directing them. That part I'm less sure of, but he is a bad man.

His daughter seems unaware or maybe she just doesn't want to know – in the way we all choose to ignore the faults of the people we love.

Now as we speed toward the airport, I try to talk to Charlie. But he's not talking.

Uncle Charlie normally talks a lot, but not when I want him to - like now. He's thinking about the future something he says he doesn't believe in – and he's thinking about her – Dani Reese. There's something there that neither of them want to admit, something real and tangible. Trust me – I know falseness its just about all I've ever seen, but I can recognize real truth when I see it.

In them together I see two halves that make a whole, it's like one person added to another equaling a complete unit and it's pretty amazing. It makes me hope that someday someone will find me and make me whole again.

She was a tiny bit jealousy when she learned I was living with Uncle Charlie, I saw it. She didn't even try to conceal her eye roll when he introduced me as "a friend of the family_." Is that what I am? Whose family?_ Charlie doesn't have one and neither do I.

Maybe he was projecting to a time when he will have a family and I'll be part of it in some fracture, fucked up, kinda of way.

I have to say that I find the prospect anyone could consider me and Uncle Charlie "hooking up" – more than a little weird, but it didn't stop that green-eyed monster from flashing across Dani Reese's face. Uncle Charlie noticed. He just pretended not to notice, but he watches her closely. He doesn't want to risk her, her protects her in a way he won't even protect himself. I think he loves her – he just doesn't want to admit it.

Normally he ignores when people misinterprets things. He doesn't care what people think – he can't. A jury of his peers thought he was guilty of murder. He wasn't. So he seems not remotely interested in correcting people's misperceptions of him or the things around him. But he took specific exception and effort to clear this up – with her. The rest of those cops could stay in the dark about who I was and why I was there, but not her. Actually to tell the truth it did make me a little envious. He cares about her opinion of him and that means she matters to him.

When she could tear her attention away from him, I was certain she recognized me. I knew her too; it took me a minute to connect the woman with the girl I'd met years before. But I saw it in her eyes, recognition, a glimmer but strong – so I stuffed it away from the light and hid.

She was just a teenager when Jack Reese brought me to their house in the middle of the night to hide me. He told her I was a distant relative and I wasn't saying much in those days, but I remember her. She was who I wanted to be – tough, resilient, kinda rebellious. She was awesome back then and apparently in Charlie's eyes she still is. He sees in her what she once was and could be again and he believes in her – more I think than she does in herself.

Uncle Charlie wants to be alone and I know the terrible things people can do when they think they are alone. He drives this fucked up car, full of holes, because it's him – the scars that won't heal both inside and out. It's like the dark clothes the Goths I know wear – it's how they feel on the inside worn outside so that people can see. The darkness we can't hide from ourselves; part of him like the scars that show – on the car and on himself.

But I'll leave, because he's no longer alone. She's with him – Dani Reese. Maybe not "with him" in the traditional sense, sexually – yet. I have the feeling that will come, but it's like a joke my friend told me about how porcupines mate – very carefully.

Those two are both of them are damaged, inside and out, they don't trust anyone – sometimes not even themselves.

I know that in the same way I know that I am not the same as the kids at my school.

But they have found or created a bond that is stronger than what they are fighting and that's why I know he'll be okay. He's a tough guy with a heart of gold. She's a tough girl who just wants to be loved – and he loves her, I'm sure of it - even if they aren't - yet. She'd better not let him down or hurt him because if she does…I'll find her and rip her heart out myself.

_Yeah, I said it. He's all the family I have left and I love him despite my better efforts not to. _He protects me, so I'll protect him.I can feel the goodness in him, fighting for control of his spirit and I can see the darkness that encircles him. On some days I'm sure he's winning and other days it seems like he's wrestling dark angels and he doesn't stand a chance. But he's still here, he's still fighting – and that's something.


End file.
